Meet some of the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers — and the innovations they are bringing to market

About half the world’s population lives in rural areas, and half of them — about 1.6 billion people — do so without electricity. How do you connect them to the rest of the planet when the average mobile-telephone base station requires 3,000 watts of power to run? “We re-engineered the entire GSM,” says Rajiv Mehrotra, CEO of an Indian telecom company, VNL, whose low-cost, voice-only, solar-powered base stations will go to market next year in India, Africa and Southeast Asia.